Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging begins on the Greek island of Lesbos, where six young Afghan men were accused of starting a fire that devastated the Moria refugee camp and displaced thousands of already displaced men, women, and children. As the book unfolds, Markham begins to explore her own Greek family’s story and search for her roots in the Aegean. The narratives merge and unravel, and the history of migration, and the real and imaginary borders we cross when we tell stories, emerges. It’s an utterly compelling balancing act. “Nothing that is happening now,” she tells me, “can be divorced from things that happened before.”
A journalist who has reported on migration and human rights for the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian, Markham is also the author of The Far Away Brothers, the story of two young immigrants from El Salvador, which won a Northern California Book Award. We talked via Zoom as an atmospheric river flowed over California.
You’ve written a lot about migration, but in this book you also center yourself. What was that like?
It was uncomfortable and strange. Often, there are self-anecdotes in my work, sort of an “I” consciousness reflecting on the things I’m seeing or learning, but this had a lot more biographical stuff, which was new for me and not all that comfortable. Largely because I had a fear it would be read as setting up a false equivalency between the remarkable plight that forced migrants are experiencing today and what my great-grandmother went through. And yet, I had an instinct early on that we have to understand migration, and politics and policies, as part of a continuum, and the Ellis Island era is a part of that. Ellis Island was, as far as we know, the first immigration prison to be built in the history of the world.
The continuum also exists in terms of the way we narrate stories about immigration. It’s important that my personal experience, my family’s experience, is a part of this book. But I felt like I was walking a tightrope to make sure I wasn’t being overly indulgent by including my own story.
People who migrate, regardless of the reason, probably share similar emotions.
Exactly. In some ways, it is equivalent, because the emotional reasons people leave are almost always the same.
I found your search for identity really compelling. Maybe it’s just me, but I wish I had a Greek grandma.
I grew up with a deep understanding and belief that I am Greek, but I had never been to Greece until I was in my mid-30s. I speak three words of Greek. And so in a way, that was sort of a fictional story. Yes, there is this lineage, but do I really belong there? So there’s this sense of desire to be from somewhere and to have some sort of meaning and purpose and connection to ancestry and identity.
Do you find that when you talk to migrants from, say, Afghanistan or Guatemala, they share a mythology about place? About where they’re going?
Yes, absolutely. The mythology goes both ways, right? Mythologizing the place that I’m going toward and then mythologizing the place that I came from. A young man I write about, Hassan—he’s one of the Afghans who got put on trial—said, “I could never have believed that this is what Europe would be, and I’m in prison, and this place has broken my heart.”
And that’s because of the mythologies on the other side.
These marauding invaders who need to be locked up for our protection. Which is, of course, absurd.
Throughout the book, you take on the migration narrative that we’re fed by the media.
The frenzied narrative of “They’re coming.” But migration starts long before and has a much longer shadow. I mean, you and I…we are migrating. Our migration story is continuing. It’s just we don’t think about it that way.
I love the part of the book when you visit the Oracle at Delphi. It made me realize you’re on a spiritual quest.
I definitely did feel like I was on a spiritual quest on a couple of levels. There’s that idea of homecoming. Who am I? What is this lineage I’m a part of? What is the truth of the mythology that has been created about my family and where we come from? The spiritual idea of connecting with ancestors and ancestry and lineage is important. Then there was also a dimension that had to do with a spiritual crisis. Among other things, I am an immigration journalist. And having written this book as well as dozens of articles, I couldn’t help feeling that I was doing and saying the same thing again and again. I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall. So that’s another spiritual dimension, in the sense of, I’m not sure I can keep writing different versions of the same story because I feel like I’m losing it, and I’m depressed about what’s happening, and I don’t have any more lament songs to sing about this.
And then, honestly, Greece is a very spirited place, as you know. You can feel it, right? A lot of weird shit happened to us there. A lot of stuff that didn’t feel like part of ordinary reality.
That’s the power of Greece in our imaginations, right? It goes all the way back to Homer. It’s the beginning of storytelling.
It took me a while to realize that this whole book is about storytelling. Who controls the narratives? What stories do we tell? When do our factual stories start to curdle or alchemize into mythologies? What do we need to believe in order to have a clear sense of who we are and where we belong in the world? The Moria fire absolutely raised these sorts of questions. Is it the story of the guilt of Greece and Lesbos and Europe itself for creating this camp in the first place? Is it a story of people being wrongly accused? Or is it a story of ungrateful refugees? We see something similar in the U.S. all the time. Right? We can narrate stories in different ways, and they mean completely different things. I think the Moria is a perfect example of that.
Back to that question of the spiritual quest. Yes, I was motivated in part by such a crisis, which is to say: What is the point and purpose of writing? I’m a writer because I believe in the written word. I’m a writer because I care about trying to make meaning of the often horrific or unfortunate things that happen in the world and to seek clarity in that meaning. I have no illusions that my book is going to set these kids free, or stop the pushback in Greece, or anything like that. This is my only tool here, and this is how I’m spending my time.•
A MAP OF FUTURE RUINS: ON BORDERS AND BELONGING, BY LAUREN MARKHAM
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of six novels, including Moist, Salty, and Blown, as well as three nonfiction books, most recently Rude Talk in Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer’s Journey Through Greece.
